Pete Alexander breaks down two types of negative stress: rumination about unchangeable past actions, which he says requires learning and forgiveness, and anxiety about future events that may never happen.
Chapters
Where we really want to focus on is the negative stress. Some people call it distress. The negative stress, where it comes in basically two flavors, based on the research I did. One is ruminating about something in the past, and this usually is something that we're either guilty or about that we did or didn't do, and we let that guilt churn inside of us. And that does us no good because it's in the past. We can't change it. We can take the positive learnings from it. And if, then if we can just forgive the rest of it, that can be an enormous help for us to get rid of that unhelpful, unproductive stress. And the other one, I kind of touched on it earlier, is anxiety about something that may or may not happen in the future.